Thursday, March 24, 2011

Function Aerobics

I love how the Carnegie text has students working with linear functions from the very first chapter (even though students don't know that is what they are called at that point). Linear functions play a very large role in the Algebra 1 curriculum. Students work with linear equations on the cognitive tutor and in the text a lot! I've found, however, that students begin to think that everything they graph will be a line.


Last year when I started the chapter on quadratics many of my students thought they had done something wrong because their graph did not look like a line. So this year I decided to change things up a bit. Before starting the official work on linear functions we looked at all of the basic parent functions and a few of their transformations. So when students get to the quadratic chapters they know that if they see x^2 in an equation they should expect to see a parabola and when they see x in an equation they should expect a line and so on.


I had each student graph the parent function for six of the families of functions. After everyone successfully finished the parent graphs we did some "function aerobics". I ask (force) the whole class to stand and we make the parent graphs with our arms (and sometimes the rest of our body if needed). The principal at my school found out that the other Algebra 1 teacher and myself were doing this and even designed and ordered us function family t-shirts. We can now have "Function Fridays" were all 9th graders wear their shirts and we practice our functions aerobics. While my students whined at first about getting up and moving around, they all did extremely well on a quiz we had where they had to identify the parent equation and family give the basic graph. Our Algebra 2 teachers are thrilled that our students will know these basic functions when they get to their classes.


However, we didn't stop there. After finishing the basic graph each group of four students was assigned to a family of functions and became experts with the basic transformations. They made posters of the parent function and several transformations which now hang on my walls. An example of one of their poster is show below:

1 comment:

Thuc-Khanh said...

Too cute!! Love the idea of Function Fridays. Thanks for a lot of wonderful ideas.

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